FRC Blog - FIRST Choice: Take Three!

[Cory]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

I believe it says average, not minimum.

Working on websites professionally, I certainly agree with FIRST and AndyMark that striving for shorter load times could take ridiculous (and expensive) resources for what we really need. So it'll take you 10 minutes instead of 2 to finish your order. I would rather FIRST invested those resources into other areas (like regionals, growing the program, preparing the new control system, etc) than use them to strive for perfection on a system we'll each use for less than 30 minutes this year.

I don't do this professionally but in 5 minutes of browsing Amazon's webhosting services it looks like you can pay $1000-2000 plus an hourly cost (a dollar an hour or so) based on utilization. I'm willing to bet Amazon can handle a few thousand people logging in at once and FIRST only has to pay extra for a few hours of high utilization (and let's be real... "high" utilization for Amazon is probably a lot more than 3000).

Maybe there's some reason that makes it not that simple... But historically FIRST has never been able to handle heavy website traffic in a fast and reliable manner.

[JohnSchneider]

Originally Posted by Cory

I don't do this professionally but in 5 minutes of browsing Amazon's webhosting services it looks like you can pay $1000-2000 plus an hourly cost (a dollar an hour or so) based on utilization. I'm willing to bet Amazon can handle a few thousand people logging in at once and FIRST only has to pay extra for a few hours of high utilization (and let's be real... "high" utilization for Amazon is probably a lot more than 3000).

Maybe there's some reason that makes it not that simple... But historically FIRST has never been able to handle heavy website traffic in a fast and reliable manner.

First could probably get it for free if they asked...

[Tem1514 Mentor]

Would a team(s) really have more then one person login to FirstChoice to improve their chances of getting items?

[MrRoboSteve]

Getting web sites to scale is not a simple "pour on the horsepower" problem. If the solution was dropping a couple $000 at AWS or Azure to increase compute, they would have done it by now.

My previous comment on the scaling issues of this site still applies, particularly in light of the 'bot request from FIRST.

[Christopher149]

Just wanted to bump this back up, in light of it opening tomorrow at 3pm Eastern.

T-19 hours

[ttldomination]

Mmmmm, First Choice day. I can already taste the latency.

Everyone got your pages cached?

- Sunny G.

[nicholsjj]

Also note the new rule stating that all items in your cart for over an hour will be dropped. Good luck to everyone today and I hope that 3 is the magical number this year.

[JB987]

One can hope

[mistersands]

What is the approximate shipping cost for an average order of lots of small to medium parts (motors, screwdriver kits, solenoids, lazy susans, couplers, etc.) ? This is my first year as a coach. I have to put out the money up front and get reimbursed, so I'm worried about how much it might come to.

[geomapguy]

Originally Posted by mistersands

What is the approximate shipping cost for an average order of lots of small to medium parts (motors, screwdriver kits, solenoids, lazy susans, couplers, etc.) ? This is my first year as a coach. I have to put out the money up front and get reimbursed, so I'm worried about how much it might come to.

In past years it's been the AndyMark shipping costs so around $10

[DonRotolo]

Maybe $20 if you get a lot of heavy stuff. Shipping - especially ground shipping - is quite reasonable. Overnight is a different $tory!

OK, about 1 hour to go. Guess I'll go log in soon.

[seg9585]

Logged in now, pages are loading fast! Even on 4G hours away from civilization in the middle of the desert!